Blackmail

THE FRACTURE . . . Between the covers

Blake Glover – BG to his friends – is a fifty-something taxi driver in his home town,the bleak fishing port of Fraserborough on Scotland’s north east coast. In a former life he was a police officer on the mean streets of Glasgow. His career ended after a messy attempt – involving planted evidence – to bring drug boss Mitch Campbell to justice. Now, Campbell has been arrested and tried, legitimately, and is awaiting sentence in Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie prison. Glover is about to find out that Campbell has long reach, despite his incarceration.

The book begins, however, with a dramatic and, apparently, unconnected scene. Out on the desolate Fraserborough shoreline, a homeless alcoholic guzzles his last few mouthfuls of ‘Buckie’ (Buckfast tonic wine) but sees something perturbing out there in the darkness. A man has has walked out onto the beach, taken off his clothes, shoes and socks, and walked out into the white horses of the tide. The drunk staggers towards the beach calling out, but he is too late; the man has disappeared. The strange event has a temporarily sobering effect on the drunk, and he returns to the town and reports what he has seen.

Meanwhile, attending the funeral of an elderly lady he knew from childhood, Glover notices something disturbing. In the teeth of a furious and drenching storm, one of the pallbearers loses control of his rope lowering the coffin into the grave. That corner of the coffin thuds into the earth – and splits. The gravediggers in the mini JCB furiously pile the earth on top of the coffin before Glover can investigate, but he drives away from the churchyard trying to make sense of what he saw. He learns that in the darker corners of the funeral business it is not unheard of for relatives to order and pay for a top of the range oak coffin, only for the corpse to be switched to a more fragile plywood version at the last minute.

The man on the beach left his wallet with his clothes and has been identified as Ray Cocklestone, a former local farmer. He is classed, at least for now, a missing person, but few locals think it will be long before he is declared a suicide. Glover is interviewed by the police, as he may have been one of the last people to have talked to Cocklestone, having taken him in his taxi from his home to a local pub.

Morgan Cry (pen name of Gordon Brown, but no, not that one) creates an intriguing and, in the end, deeply sinister plot line which links the mystery of the splitting coffin and the disappearance of Ray Cocklestone with the truly dreadful things that take place courtesy of The Dark Web and the anonymity it gives its users. The Mitch Campbell storyline develops separately, and is one which comes to threaten not only Glover’s relatively modest current career, but his freedom and, perhaps, his life itself.

There are two central characters in the novel. One is the flawed, but likeable Glover. His lifestyle is certainly destructive, at least from a dietary point of view. He exists on industrial quantities of service station pasties and Mars bars, washed down with copious draughts of that peculiar Scottish delicacy, Iran-Bru. His taxi driver life is a miasma of unwashed passengers and the sickly scent of yet another air-freshener dangling from the rear view mirror. The other imposing presence in the book is Fraseborough itself. The town is frequently battered by the storms swirling in from the North Sea. The reluctant hedgerows and trees dolefully wear their permanent Christmas decorations of discarded plastic bags and wrappers from last night’s fish supper. The pubs, the houses, the leisure centres and the rain washed supermarket car parks are all bleak enough, but the people of the town are lovingly painted for the most part, with their impenetrable Aberdeenshire accents and their abiding love of gossip. The Fracture will be published by Severn House on 4th November.

October 31, 2025 0

THE SCREAM OF SINS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, Autumn 1824. Simon Westow is engaged by a retired military man, Captain Holcomb, to recover some papers which have been stolen from his house. They concern the career of his father, a notoriously hard-line magistrate. Newcomers to the series may find this graphic helpful to establish who is who.

Westow takes the job, but is concerned when Holcomb refuses to reveal what might be in the missing papers, thus preventing the thief taker from narrowing down a list of suspects. As is often the case in this excellent series, what begins as case of simple theft turns much darker when murder raises its viler and misshapen head.

Jane, Westow’s sometime assistant, has taken a step back from the work as, under the kind attention of Catherine Shields, she is learning that there is a world outside the dark streets she used to inhabit. The lure of books and education is markedly different from the law of the knife, and a life spent lurking in shadowy alleys. Nevertheless, she agrees to come back to help Westow with his latest case, which has turned sour. When Westow, suspecting there is more to the case than meets the eye, refuses to continue looking for the missing documents, Holcomb threatens to sue him and ruin his reputation.

More or less by accident, Westow and Jane have uncovered a dreadful series of crimes which may connected to the Holcomb documents. Young girls – and it seems the younger the better – have been abducted for the pleasure of certain wealth and powerful ‘gentlemen’. Jane, galvanised by her own bitter memories of being sexually abused by her father, meets another youngster from the streets, Sally.

Sally is a mirror image of Jane in her younger days – street-smart, unafraid of violence, and an expert at wielding a viciously honed knife. Jane hesitates in recruiting the child to a way of life she wishes to move away from, but the men involved in the child abuse must be brought down, and Sally’s apparent innocence is a powerful weapon.

As ever in Nickson’s Leeds novels, whether they be these, the Victorian era Tom Harper stories, or those set in the 1940s and 50s, the city itself is a potent force in the narrative. The contrast between the grinding poverty of the underclass – barely surviving in their insanitary slums – and the growing wealth of the merchants and factory owners could not be starker. The paradox is not just a human one. The River Aire is the artery which keeps the city’s heart beating, but as it flows past the mills and factories, it is coloured by the poison they produce. Yet, at Kirkstall, where it passes the stately ruins of the Abbey it is still – at least in the 1820s – a pure stream home to trout and grayling. Just an hour’s walk from Westow’s beat, there are moors, larks high above, and air unsullied by sulphur and the smoke of foundry furnaces.

The scourge of paedophilia is not something regularly used as subject matter in crime fiction, perhaps because it is – and this is my personal view – if not the worst of all crimes, then at least as bad as murder. Yes, the victims that survive may still live and breathe, but their innocence has been ripped away and, in its place, has been implanted a mental and spiritual tumour for which there is no treatment. Two little girls are rescued by Westow, Jane and Sally and are restored to their parents, but what living nightmares await them in the years to come we will never know.

I have come to admire Nickson’s passion for his city and its history, and his skill at making characters live and breathe is second to none, but in this powerful and haunting novel he reminds us that we are only ever a couple of steps from the abyss. The Scream of Sins will be published by Severn House on 5th March.

March 1, 2024 0

RUSTED SOULS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, March 1920. Tom Harper is Chief Constable of the City force and, with just six weeks until his retirement, he is dearly hoping for a quiet ride home for the final furlong of what has been a long and distinguished career. His hopes are dashed, however, when he is summoned to the office of Alderman Ernest Thompson, the combative, blustering – but very powerful – leader of the City Council. Thompson has one last task for Harper, and it is a very delicate one. The politician has fallen a trap that is all too familiar to many elderly men of influence down the years. He has, shall we say, been indiscreet with a beautiful but much younger woman, Charlotte Radcliffe. Letters that he foolishly wrote to her have “gone missing” and now he has an anonymous note demanding money – or else his reputation will be ruined. He wants Harper to solve the case, but keep everything completely off the record. Grim-faced, Harper has little choice but to agree. It is due to Thompson’s support and encouragement that he is ending his career as Chief Constable, with a comfortable pension and an untarnished reputation. He chooses a small group of trusted colleagues, swears them to secrecy, and sets about the investigation.

He soon has other things to worry about. A quartet of young armed men robs a city centre jewellers, terrifying the staff by firing a shot into the ceiling. They strike again, but this time with fatal consequences. A bystander tries to intervene, and is shot dead for his pains. Many readers will have been following this excellent series for some time, and will know that tragedy has struck the Harper family. Tom’s wife Annabelle has what we know now as dementia, and requires constant care. Their daughter Mary is a widow. Her husband Len is one of the 72000 men who fought and died on the Somme, but have no known grave, and no memorial excep tfor a name on the Thiepval Memorial to The Missing.. Unlike many widows, however, she has been able to rebuild her life, and now runs a successful secretarial agency. Leeds, however, like so many communities, is no place fit for heroes:

“‘Times are hard.’
“I know,” Harper agreed.
It was there in the bleak faces of the men, the worn-down looks of their wives, the hunger that kept the children thin. The wounded ex-servicemen reduced to begging on the streets. Things hadn’t changed much from when he was young. Britain had won the war but forgotten its own people.”

Nickson’s descriptions of his beloved Leeds are always powerful, but here he describes a city – like many others – reeling from a double blow. As if the carnage of the Great War were not enough, the Gods had another spiteful trick up their sleeves in the shape of Spanish Influenza, which killed 228000 people across the country. Many people are still wearing gauze masks in an attempt to ward off infection.

The hunt for the jewel robbers and Ernest Jackson’s letters continues almost to the end of the book and, as ever, Nickson tells a damn good crime story; for me however, the focus had long since shifted elsewhere. This book is all about Tom and Annabelle Harper. Weather-wise, spring is definitely in the air, as bushes and trees come back to life after the bareness of winter, but there is a distinctly autumnal air about what is happening on the page. Harper is, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, not the man he was.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.

As he tries to help at the scene of a crime, he reflects:

“There was nothing he could do to help here; he was just another old man cluttering up the pavement and stopping the inspector from doing his job.”

As for Annabelle, the lovely, brave and vibrant woman of the earlier books, little is left:

“The memories would remain. She’d have them too, but they were tucked away in pockets that were gradually being sewn up. All her past was being stolen from her. And he couldn’t stop the theft.”

This is a magnificent and poignant end to the finest series of historical crime fiction I have ever read. It is published by Severn House and will be available on 5th September. For more about the Tom Harper novels, click this link.

September 4, 2023 0

HOT HOUSE . . . Between the covers

Mari E is an LA private investigator, distinctly low-rent to judge by her business premises, a converted container in a down-at-heel part of the city. Her premises neighbours are mostly scammers and grifters of one kind or another. She is a former government agent. She has been hired by an federal appellate judge to find out who is blackmailing him. Whoever it is wants her off the case and has been threatening her with anonymous notes. She is also certain she is being followed. For back-up she hires a partner, former LAPD detective, and now a PI himself, Derek Abernathy. He is very smart, though, and soon works out that Mari E leads a double life.

“So I have two jobs, what’s the big deal? A girl’s gotta make a living, right?”
“Jobs? More like lives,” he hissed back, pointing outside towards the parking lot.
“Mari E, as you call yourself, drives a fifteen year-old dented Honda and wears a weathered hoodie artificially inseminated with the smell of smoke and vanilla cologne. Mar-ISSA, on the other hand, drives a freaking Porsche and buys her eight-hundred-dollar Ferragamo shoes in Beverly Hills, which she wears to her Culver City art gallery!”

That is just a quick sample of the whip-crack dialogue in the book, which fizzles and sparks like electricity across terminals. Very soon Mari and Derek realise that the blackmailed judge is also connected to the unsolved murder of a French duel-passport student, Sophie Michaud, and the fate of two women journalists who investigated the case, one of whom is dead and the other missing.

Mari has her own crusade, which is related to her being shot while on a case twelve months or so previously. Her father resolved to take his own revenge on the European crime boss responsible, but neither has been seen since. She realises that if she can discover who killed Sophie, the rest of house of cards will come tumbling down. Big problem, though. She discovers that Sophie was not just one person. Yes, physically she was one body, but psychologically two separate beings lived under that particular roof, and were even known by different names – Sophie and Sasha. One was a dreamy and talented creative artist, while the other was a calculating sexual schemer who used information about potential blackmail victims with the ruthless logic of a criminal Marie Kondo.

Good crime writers can be lyrical when they need to be, and if there were any doubt that LIsa Towles is a genuine California Girl, this passage dispels it.

“There were some places where the quality of the light is always good, and others where it’s never quite right. Too bright to see an incoming text, too dark to find your keys in the bottom of your bag. Besides California, I’d lived in three other states, and somehow the light in LA had a quality that didn’t exist anywhere else. Sometimes the sun was so high and bright, it bled out all detail leaving a luminous silvery cloak over the sand and surf. Then at dusk, that same beachfront hides in climbing shadows, with only small details visible beneath the streetlamps. It was the unsinkable promise of light and dark that anchored me to this place, this stretch of rugged coastline with its seagulls and secrets.”

In the end, the blackmailer of the judge is located, and the killer of Sophie/Sasha is brought to justice, but with literally the last sentence, Lisa Towles poses another puzzle which will presumably be addressed in the next book. Hot House is everything a California PI novel should be. It has pace, great dialogue, totally credible characters and a pass-the-parcel mystery where Lisa Towles (right) has great fun describing how Ellwyn and Abernathy peel back the layers to get to the truth. Sure, the pair might not yet stand shoulder to shoulder with Marlowe, Spade and Archer, or even more modern characters like Bosch and Cole, but they have arrived, and something tells me they are here to stay.

Hot House is published by ‎ Indies United Publishing House, LLC, and will be available in the UK as a Kindle, audiobook and hardback from 15th June. The paperback was published in March. For my reviews of three earlier novels by Lisa Towles, just click on the cover images

June 2, 2022 0

THE POSTMAN DELIVERS …Stokes and Westworth

westworth-stokes-header
Today’s delivery of two contrasting packets looked intriguing. One was large and weighty, while the other was much slimmer. When I opened the envelopes and looked at the books the differences couldn’t have been greater. One book, Blackmail, is actually written by a retired Judge, and the Nottingham Post tells us:

“The 68-year-old resident judge at Nottingham Crown Court once had a rapist expose himself to him in the dock, and was assaulted by a defendant during a trial in Leicester. He has also been sworn at countless times by unhappy crooks and their families.”

So, Michael Stokes has clearly faced down a generation or two of hardened criminals, and now he has put his experience to good use with his first novel, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the story features a judge who is presiding over a high profile criminal trial. When his wife and son are kidnapped, the ransom is a simple one. Rule against the prosecution of gangster Michael Doyle, or you will never see your family again. Blackmail is published by Matador/Troubador and is out now.

If you check the graphic at the top of this feature, it shouldn’t be too difficult to spot which is the retired judge, and which is Frank Westworth, a novelist whose twin passions are powerful motorbikes and playing blues guitar. Frank wrote us an excellent feature a while back called Killing Me Softly – A Guide To Murder, and you can click the link to read it.

Now Frank has published, via Murder, Mayhem and More – or M3 – a collection of stories involving his distinctly unusual covert operator, JJ Stoner. A fellow writer has warned us to expect “Guns, girls, guitars and gruesome violence,” so lovers of Noir with a distinctly English flavour may well want to grab this slick and stylish volume. Me? I’ve got a signed copy, so I am feeling rather smug. The book will be available on 14th November, and here’s where to buy it.